This is the first item I've tried to purchase here at DAZ in ages and it's not going well. The purchase will not go through. The cart says I have 1 item in my cart but when I try to purchase it tells me my cart is empty.

The product has a PDF instruction manual. See the Spheric Labs Labs entry in the Carrara plugin FAQ & Information post. I put a link to it, links to other things, and stated to compile a FAQ about the plugin. (Did all last night at around 2:30 AM and have been doing minor edits during the day.)

This is the first item I've tried to purchase here at DAZ in ages and it's not going well. The purchase will not go through. The cart says I have 1 item in my cart but when I try to purchase it tells me my cart is empty.

Frustrating. Contacting support now.

So sad.

That's a known problem that has been around for a while. To get around it you need to add another item -- anything -- to the cart. After that the hidden item should show up along with the new one which can then be deleted.

Carrara is now part of the Luxrender team together with 3dsmax, Cinema4D, XSI, Poser, Blender.
There are many more expensive 3D apps that does not have Luxrender exporters, a big thank you to Spheric Labs!

DOF didn't work in the first release of Luxus for DS (much to the annoyance of many-a user), so I would assume it was added this time around.

With Luxus for DS you had to use very small F-stop settings to get desired results. You could need to use anything as low as .01 - maybe more. F-stop isn't actually tied to DOF in LuxRender, so that might have something to do with the strange settings. Hope this helps. It has been too long since I did any rendering/playing with cameras in Carrara, so I don't even recall how DOF works there.

You should be able to save the scene as a .lux to render later (will do this at export from Carrara). Luxrender will intermittently save a .flm while rendering which you can use to resume your render. You can also manually save a .flm yourself by going to File > Save FLM. I don't know where exports from C are being saved, but with Luxus for DS they were being saved to a temp location that wiped every time you rest your computer (or was it whenever you ended a DS session?). Make sure you're scenes aren't being saved to a temp location - or doom!

I downloaded the "luxus render plugin" on Carrara cafe but I just get a yellow window (same as holly wetcircuit)

I did get it to work, although I didn't keep up with all the betas during his very fast development cycle...

The thing is to be very thorough with all your shaders, to convert them all to the Lux shaders. I actually had at least 1 non-lux shader that sneaked through (not really sure how it rendered, I didn't see anything horrible in the render), but it seems having Carrara shaders in the scene was the problem I had....

I hope it's ok to ask a few questions, here. If not, I'll start a new thread.

Is there a way to saved the scene to render later?
Does DOF work in this version?

I don't know about DOF..., but when I used the beta Carrara writes a LuxRender scene file. I was able to double-click these scene files to launch LuxRender.... Writing the scene file seems to launch LuxRender, but I assume can just cancel the render....